Getting Started/Build/Example

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Example Build

The following example recipe shows the full sequence of commands you would need to enter into the command line to build a typical KDE module:

cd ~/kde-devel/src
git clone http://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs.git
mkdir ~/kde-devel/build/kdelibs
cd ~/kde-devel/build/kdelibs
cmake ~/kde-devel/src/kdelibs \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull \
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR
make
make install

Let's break that recipe down and explain each step.

Source

First you navigate to a convenient folder to save the code in:

cd ~/kde-devel/src

Then request a copy of the code from the KDE source repository, in this example a copy of kdelibs from Git:

git clone http://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs.git

This may take some time to process. For Git you will see out output similar to:

myuser@mybox:~/kde-devel/src> git clone http://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs.git
http://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/myuser/kde-devel/src/kdelibs/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 722134, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (138759/138759), done.
remote: Total 722134 (delta 586243), reused 715797 (delta 580373)
Receiving objects: 100% (722134/722134), 140.90 MiB | 706 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (586243/586243), done.
myuser@mybox:~/kde-devel/src>

This example will create a folder called ~/kde-devel/src/kdelibs containing all the kdelibs source code and all its history since KDE began.

For an SVN checkout you will instead see output similar to:

myuser@mybox:~/kde-devel/src> svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk
A    kdesdk/cmake
A    kdesdk/cmake/samples
A    kdesdk/cmake/samples/kpager
A    kdesdk/cmake/samples/kpager/CMakeLists.txt
...
A    kdesdk/COPYING.LIB
U   kdesdk
Checked out revision 1223739.
myuser@mybox:~/kde-devel/src>

Configure

First you create a convenient folder to build the code in:

mkdir ~/kde-devel/build/kdelibs
cd ~/kde-devel/build/kdelibs

Next you need to run CMake to create the configuration files to be used in the build:

cmake ~/kde-devel/src/kdelibs \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull \
      -DKDE4_BUILD_TESTS=TRUE \
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR

Various options can be passed to CMake to control how a project gets built, but these are the most common:

The first line tells CMake where it can find the source code that is to be built.
The second line tells CMake what type of build is required, in this example a debugfull build that will include useful information for when we are debugging any the software.
The third line tells CMake we also want the unit tests to be built.
The fourth line tells CMake where to install the software.

Example Build

Source

Configure

Build

Update